Italian court sentenced Ukrainian trooper to 24 years for war crime in Donbass

On Friday, an Italian court in Pavia passed its judgment in the high-profile case of Vitaly Markiv. He was found responsible for the May 2014 killings of Italian photojournalist Andrea Rocchelli and Russian human rights activist Andrei Mironov, who served as an interpreter for a group of journalists covering the civil war in Eastern Ukraine.

Markiv, who has Italian citizenship, was a member of one of Ukraine’s volunteer battalions that sided with Kiev in the conflict. A squad under his command marked the journalists’ car as a target for fellow troops, who fired mortar shells at it, the prosecution said.

The two victims were killed while French photo reporter William Roguelon was injured in the assault. The Italian court agreed that Markiv knew that the car was full of civilians and initiated the attack despite this, and sentenced him to 24 years in prison. The punishment is harsher than the 17 years the prosecution was asking for.

The sentence sparked outrage in Ukraine, where Markiv is perceived by nationalists as a hero and a victim of persecution by the Italian authorities. Dmitry Yarosh, a Ukrainian MP and former leader of the far-right umbrella group Right Sector, called for drastic measures in retaliation.

“I suggest a special operation in connection with the decision of the ‘independent’ Italian court in the case of Vitaly Markiv. Let’s ‘pack’ [slang for ‘round up’] a dozen Italians, who arrive in Ukraine from time to time,” he wrote in a blog, pledging support for fellow nationalists.

"We will charge them with being part of the illegal armed groups… and murdering Ukrainian civilians between 2014–2019; hold a lengthy trial. And then our ‘most objective’ court will sentence them to life."

https://www.rt.com/news/464089-ukraine-mp-round-up-italians/

 

How I hate nationalists.

 

Does that mean you would have refused to serve inthe military in WWII?

That was a war between American nationslism and german and japanese nationalism

 

No doubt for some it was. They would have fought for America, had it been run by Nazis, and the Japanese and Germans had been democratic.
But the American leaders tried to make it a war for democracy, and not a war against the German or Japanese people.

And they were right to do so.

But to turn the question around: would you have fought for a Nazi-run US, against democratic enemies?

 

We're defining nationalism differently.
Nationalism is a variant of tribalism -- my tribe above all others.
In the West, we've started to outgrow religious/ethnic tribalism -- the Americans were in the vanguard of this, with America the great 'melting pot'. So people of Japanese ancestry could fight like tigers in WWII FOR the US, despite their relatives being interned, because we didn't define America as a white nation, or a Christian nation, except in the sense that most of its citizens were white Christians and that (Protestant) Christianity was the ethic of the original founders.

That's being reversed by the Left now, with great success. They hope to split America along racial lines.

By the way, the majority of Germans, by 2 to 1, voted against Hitler in lhe last free election they had. My heroes among Germans are the ones who continued to resist Hitler, even though he was the 'legal' government of Germany. People like the White Rose.

 

WWII was the American and British tribe against the german and japanese tribe

It was nationalism in every sense of the word

 

Hahaha....another RT urinal link....total BS....while at the same time Italian authorities seize missile used by Vatnik Neo Nazi vermin in the DPR.

Is Strelkov dead yet.no he's hiding like a coyote in Moskalis!LOL.

 

Sure, the average American fought for 'his country', as did the average German and the average Russian. Most people will go along with what their government tells them to do, so long as they see that government as at least reasonably competent in defending their interests.

But as civilization advances, our ideas of what is right and proper also advance. There have been plenty of wars where it was just one nation-state against another, with no pretence on either side about fighting for a greater cause - although most states like to at least keep a fig-leaf of respectability by arguing that their side is just defending some internationally-recognized norm.

But to take the case of America: in the Second World War, it claimed to be defending 'democracy': FDR called on us to be the 'arsenal of democracy' before the war ... and we actually had no nationalist quarrel with the Germans, and more of one with the British.

Why otherwise would Japanese Americans have fought so well for the United States?

And you yourself: if the US were taken over by Communists or Nazis, who proceeded to get it into a war with a country which still had liberty and democracy ... surely you wouldn't fight for the US in those circumstances?

I recall an obituary in National Review a couple of years ago, of someone whose name I don't remember. He and his son had fled from communist-controlled Hungary and had come to the US ... at some point, as I recall, his son, as they arrived, asked a question about who they were ... and he replied "We are Americans. We were just born in the wrong country."

[Whoops ... got that wrong: here is the actual quote from a Hungarian preparing to flee his country after the Russians began crushing the 1956 Revolution ...It's his son speaking"

And not National Review, but the excellent Claremont Review of Books. [ Source ] (Anyone reading this should click on that link and read the whole thing.)

Look, it's the Left who want to define the US as just another racist imperialist country run by white men. We shouldn't join them in this.

 

Contrary to appearances, the US was never nationalistic. We don't even have an official language. That English dominates probably had to do with commerce.

 

They fought for their country

Our nation against the german and japanese nations

 

One of the good things -- and there were some -- about the old Soviet Union is that, while Russian nationalism no doubt inspired much of its Russian population, it definitely paid lip service to standing for higher ideals, for the interests of humanity as a whole. And even today, because it's still a multi-ethnic country, the Russian nationalism can only go so far. You see the same thing in India, which, while being led by a horrible Hindu nationalist, still does things like honoring its Muslim soldiers.

Ideas are a refraction of the underlying material reality, and big countries with diverse populations actually have a material interest in eschewing narrow nationalist (which is always ethnic) chauvinism.

 

Yes, and our nation has been in the vanguard of transcending racial/religious divisions, in favor of liberty, the rights of the common man, of democracy, open to anyone who believes in these things. So American 'nationalism' was different from German and Japanese nationalism, which was purely racial. And their nationalisms got in the way of pursuing an intelligent strategy in the countries they occupied ... especially the Germans.

It's the Hard Left who want to deny this, because they want to split the country on racial lines. And the terrible reality is, that it's now in the hands of those Democrats who identify with the party of FDR and JFK, to prevent them from doing this.

 

The Prussian militarism and orderliness of the Germans appealed to the Japanese so they mimicked them in attitude and actions. Both nations were able to commit genocide with no qualms as did some nations and people allied with them - such as Catholic Croatia, Catholic Western Ukraine and Muslim Bosnia. All were under the Austrian Hungarian Empire at one time, so it must have affected them in some way, otherwise why would they want to kill off their fellow Slavs?

To the credit of the Germans, most were just following orders. They had no other choice, something that can't be said about the others. As for the Italians, they didn't commit genocide. It was not part of their Latin make up. I don't believe the Romanians or Bulgarians did either - nor the Finns and Slovakians.

I'm just speculating.

 

Ahem...

nationalism
[ nash-uh-nl-iz-uh m, nash-nuh-liz- ]

noun
spirit or aspirations common to the whole of a nation.
devotion and loyalty to one's own country; patriotism.
excessive patriotism; chauvinism.
the desire for national advancement or political independence.
the policy or doctrine of asserting the interests of one's own nation viewed as separate from the interests of other nations or the common interests of all nations.
an idiom or trait peculiar to a nation.

 

Yes. I hate the part that's not printed in red, just below.
Be careful of relying on dictionaries, which are written by people, and will soon be written by Politically Correct people.
In any case, we have to ask how a word is actually used in the real world.

It's natural -- biological -- to love yourself. Unless you've got some mental flaw, you'll love your family, although in modern society, where they're often geographically spread around, this is now attenuated a lot. But up until the 20th Century, in most countries (which were not countries of immigration), your family were nearby. They were the people you could count on. Then, in some societies, probably the really immobile ones, comes your clan, your extended family. And then the tribe. It's natural, tied to the biological drive to survive and replicate your genes. Not a virtue or a vice. In some Third World countries, it's the clan or tribe that you look to for help, not the corrupt incompetent state.

That's the problem we ran into in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's the problem of Africa. This quasi-biological loyalty transcends loyalty to the 'nation', which usually was an artificial thing imposed by the colonialists.

Nationalism has not always been bad: the democratic upsurge in Europe in the middle of the 19th Century took a national form: indeed, this period was called 'the springtime of the nations'. But they were mainly fighting to get out from under empires. In the colonial world, where a small country was relatively ethnically homogeneous, nationalism was directed at the colonial oppressor, and had no immediately harmful effects. (But in some places, an ethnic or religious minority which had been favored by the colonialists could catch hell: witness the poor Tamils of Sri Lanka, or Bahai's and Christians in the Muslim world.) Even in Europe, the geographic mixing up of Poles, Germans, Hungarians, and Czechs had very bad consequences and may still have some. If anyone reading this is not familiar with that horrible reality, read Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands.

Nationalists, especially when the nation is just the tribe, as in many countries, are just self-lovers, and lovers of those who bear a lot of their genes. Why we're supposed to respect that, is beyond me. It's just self-interest -- not wicked in itself, but not anything to idealize.

Nationalism of countries which are multi-ethnic is always a slightly artificial thing, and not as bad as the zoological nationalism of tribe-countries. Yugoslav 'nationalism' was harmless. Serbian and Croatian nationalism, not. They're still trying to make a Cypriot 'nation' which can embrace Greek and Turk -- lots of luck with that one. The 'nationalism' of the various artificial African states is almost non-existent -- they're openly tribalist.

The late PaleoConservative Joe Sobran made this distinction: a patriot loves his country, a nationalist hates other countries. I think, with the qualifications I've written above, that that is a pretty good definition of nationalism. People who actually hate competing tribes. And that's why I hate them.

 

Since you appear to be a traditional liberal I feel your pain

Its a bad dream where we see the train racing down the track toward a group of people who are milling around in its path

You shout. Watch Out! but they do not hear you

 

Russias multi ethnicity predates the Soviet Union. Unlike us though, each group lives in its own territory. The only problem they had were with the Jews, but not because of religion, but because of the liberal ideals that were brought in from Poland and Germany. Catherine the Great for all her correspondence with Voltaire and others, stopped all concepts of the Enlightenment with the French revolution and its ensuing massacres. (How the French can celebrate Bastille day behooves me).

When the people from the Caucasus began moving en masse into Moscow after the Chechnya wars there were ethnic problems. There was also resentment over the massive amounts spent by Putin to rebuild Grozny.

The resentment ended when Kadyrov's men proved how loyal they were to 'Mother Russia' by fighting the junta in the Donbas. Contrary to the MSM lies, had Russian troops entered Ukraine it would have turned into a major war. The Chechnyans were also a blessing in Syria since they are Sunnis and are being used in the deconfliction zones, as well as guards on the Syrian Israeli border.

Today there are 123 languages spoken in the Russia Federation, and many are taught in school as a second language. When Vladimir Putin told Poroshenko that Ukraine should be federalized so it can remain intact, his response was that they do not take suggestions from Russia. So their policy of ethnic cleansing continues.

The marvelous thing about Russia, and I'm going back to imperial Russia, is that they can maintain good relationships even with the Muslim Republics even though it is an Orthodox country. Proselytizing though is against the law, and was never allowed in the Orthodox faith. There is nothing more insulting than going into a nation that has been Christian for a thousand years, and telling them that they are not Christians unless they worship the same way they do.

But this imposition of one's standards was always a Western trait and goes back to the Crusades. It has always created resentment, and continues to do so.

 

I'm more of a JFK/FDR Democrat, like my whole family in Texas -- hell, like everybody in Texas -- before the Party began to move Left. We didn't change, the Democratic Party did.

Now they (my family anyway) all vote Republican, although some went for Ross Perot when he ran. And over the years, when I've been involved in American politics, it's always been for the Republicans. No present-day liberal considers me a liberal, I promise.

The train is the USA, and it's a pile of bolders we're heading for.

Almost every country in the world that has been made up of significant numbers of more than one tribe, has experienced a civil war. Sometimes a foreign power can keep them in check, as in Northern Ireland. Sometimes the whole place just comes apart, with forced population transfers, mass murder, rapes, etc, as in the Balkans, Cyprus. Sometimes the minority just gets squashed, as in Burma or Sri Lanka. Modern tolerant liberal democracies seem to be incapable of acting to defend themselves -- as witness what's happening in socialist Sweden. It's ongoing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it's very sad to see poor old Uncle Sam staggering around in those places trying to keep the tribes from butchering each other.

On the other hand, authoritarian governments can keep the lid on. Singapore is 85% Chinese, and you can believe they won't let that number shift downwards a lot. When people apply to buy an apartment there, their race is take into account. If you're a Muslim or a Hindu, you'll get your flat -- in the middle of a bunch of Chinese ... they aren't going to allow any minority ghettoes to build up. Everyone serves in the military, but, as a friend there told me, no Muslim gets promoted above the rank of captain. (Well, it's the 'religion of peace', so why would they want high command?)

The Hard Left believe that out of the smoking rubble of the United States, they will build the Perfect Society. What we're likely to see is an expansion of Mexico, and genuine white nationalism in the areas outside of that, which will be very ugly. Smart white nationalists will offer the Blacks their Republic of New Africa -- at the expense of Hispanics perhaps. (See the Balkans, and the shifting alliances among Muslim Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs.) Where the white liberals will go I have no idea.

Oh well ... probably won't happen. God looks after America, after all.

 

Total BS? It's a fact. Prove if it's wrong.

It's a lie. Read here: http://www.politicalforum.com/index...-reuters-fake-factory.558836/#post-1070775758

 

Yeah sure it is....read my thread about this being just a Russki op...LOL.

Just the vatniks greasing pockets to get what they want?

War crime?? Hopefully Strelkov sees a courtroom soon enough....or simply just put a bullet in his head!!
...

 

I think there's a difference between wanting to preserve one's own culture, heritage, and faith and trying to destroy the other person's culture, heritage, faith under the belief that their own is superior. One to me is patriotism and the other is nationalism. Americans have always been patriotic. That our government's actions speak otherwise, is only because the corporate medias can keep it well hidden from the American people.

,
From what I know, splitting nations into ethnic/tribal states was a policy Britain used to keep nations weak. By making sure some nation/states were more prosperous than others kept them from wanting to unite. They did this in the ME by drawing lines in the sand and giving some tribes oil, and the others nothing. In Northern Ireland they gave beneficial trade deals so that they wouldn't want to unite with the rest of Ireland, and they did that in Cyprus as well so that they wouldn't want to unite with Greece.

Legally Cyprus should be part of Greece. Britain promised to free the island and hand it over at the end of WWII, but Greece at the time was emmeshed in a communist civil war so Britain held back. When Greece brought it to the UN later on, Britain aroused the 11% Turks on the island to object. When some nationalists in Greece responded to the Turkish provocations, Kissinger gave Turkey the go ahead to invade the island and grab and re populate one third of Cyprus with Turks.

We have been mimicking Britain's policies. We broke up Yugoslavia so they would be at one another's throats over boundaries, etc., and in Syria we supported the terrorists who were committing genocide against Christians, so we could get rid of the secular legally elected Assad and weaken Syria by breaking it up into ethnic enclaves. This is the reason Russia intervened.

 

Yes, the old empires were all multi-ethnic, and in that respect, were better than the fragmented nations that replaced them.
Lenin complained a lot about 'Great Russian Chauvinism' even among the Social Democrats there. Probably inevitable, given that the Muslim nations, and the tribes in Siberia, were more backward than the Russians.
There is a long and honorable tradition of devotion to democracy among the Russian intelligentsia. It's not dead, and when the current phase of national self-assertion has passed, it will flourish again. At the moment, if you're too outspoken, you get a bullet in the back.

But that doesn't mean that Russia is some sort of North Korea -- there is plenty of low-level dissent, protests, exposes of the abuse of power, and sometimes the protestors win.

The vile Orthodox Church has always been the handmaiden of whoever has power, and of course they try to crush the competition. Never mind, it will help make young Russians into atheists.

It's wrong to believe that because things happened in a certain way, they had to happen in that way. The West, mainly the US, bears a huge responsibility for the way things have turned out in Russia. A different attitude towards Russia in the 1990s would have made an enormous difference in that country's political evolution. It is THE great failure of Bill Clinton's foreign policy.

 

America did not break up yugoslavia

It was always two cuktures held together by force by a strongman - tito - who died

 

Maybe not the whole country but during Nam, you heard the phrase "my country right or wrong". That's about as close to nationalism as you can get.

 

"My country, right or wrong" is an extension of "Me, right or wrong". However, it was said during a time in which there tended to be no "right or wrong" in national struggles, although the preceding sentence was "My country, may she always be in the right". Prior to the 20th Century, wars were not about ideology -- the British didn't go to war with the French explicitly to defend constitutional monarchy, and the French, despite the ideological zeal of the French Revolution, didn't envisage extending one-man-one-vote to the British. (Leaving aside that after a decade, they abandoned that and put an Emperor in charge of their country.)

If you don't have a country, you're in big trouble. It's like having your neighborhood guarded by a policeman, with violent criminals prowling around on the outside. Your policeman might be a bit too rough with the neighborhood kids, he might even accept a ten-dollar bill to let you off a speeding charge, but ... right or wrong, he's your policeman. Because there is no alternative. Probably a lot of Germans, as the Red Army approached their country, had the same attitude.

And so long as large parts of the outside world is, or appears to be, violent criminals prowling around looking to break in, that's the attitude that people who have any sense of self-preservation will take.